[4] _The Races of Europe_, W. Z. Ripley, p. 17.
By way of illustration, it may be pointed out in this connection that English is spoken at the present day by, among others, the Hong Kong Chinamen, the American Red Indians and negroes, by the natives of Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and the Scottish Highlands, besides the descendants of the ancient Britons, the Jutes, the Angles, the Saxons, the Norsemen, the Danes, and the Normans in England, but all these peoples cannot be classified in the racial sense simply as Englishmen. Similarly, the varied types of humanity who are Aryan in speech cannot all be regarded as representatives of the “Aryan race”, that is, if we accept the theory of an “Aryan race”, which Virchow, by the way, has characterized as “a pure fiction”.
Max Müller, in his closing years, faced this aspect of the problem frankly and courageously. “Aryas”, he wrote, “are those who speak Aryan languages, whatever their colour, whatever their blood. In calling them Aryas we predicate nothing of them except that the grammar of their language is Aryan.... I have declared again and again that if I say Aryas, I mean neither blood, nor bones, nor hair, nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language. The same applies to Hindus, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Celts, and Slavs. When I speak of these I commit myself to no anatomical characteristics. The blue-eyed and fair-haired Scandinavians may have been conquerors or conquered, they may have adopted the language of their darker lords or their subjects, or vice versa. I assert nothing beyond their language when I call them Hindus, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Celts, and Slavs, and in that sense, and in that sense only, do I say that even the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians.... To me an ethnologist who speaks of an Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.”[5]
[5] _Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas_, pp. 120 and 245.
Aryan, however, has been found to be a convenient term, and even ethnologists do not scorn its use, although it has been applied “in a confusing variety of signification by different philologists”. One application of it is to the language group comprising Sanskrit, Persian, Afghan, &c. Some still prefer it to “Indo-European”, which has found rivals in “Afro-European”, among those who connect the Aryan languages with North Africa, and “Afro-Eurasian”, which may be regarded as universal in its racial application, especially if we accept Darwin's theory that the Garden of Eden was located somewhere in Africa.[6] We may think of the Aryans as we do of the British when that term is used to include the peoples embraced by the British Empire.